Three replies to things I saw today on Planet Debian on blogs of people that don’t have fully-working web comment systems:-
- Professional Slide Installer (usual buggy blogger.com CAPTCHA) – yes, they exist. My village’s council sometimes hires them. I think they’re carpenters who have specialised. There are also professional slide inspectors (well, childrens’ play area safety inspectors, but professional slide inspector sounds cooler).
- Internet Speed Hype (usual buggy wordpress kind-a captcha) – ThePhone.Coop (UK) doesn’t cap, but charges extra if you go over your subscription amount. We have a monitoring system that lets you check your usage fairly easily and set up email alerts when your prepaid amount is almost used up. (I work for agent AG_471 of ThePhone.Coop but I think I’d like them anyway.)
- home of the madduck/ blog/ Recovering a lost default route (site under construction – see bottom of page) – I was told by a very wise man to always start a delayed reboot (shutdown -r +5) before messing with anything to do with the networking on a remote machine.
My blog has a comment system. Anyway, delayed reboots have their own set of problems. What I *should* have done is add an explicit route to some other machine out there to guard against that case in the future. This is now in place on all of my machines (as well as a route to the IPv6 tunnel peers).
I didn’t see the “Discussion” link at the top of the page before, but clicking it and then “Edit” gets a long “Waiting for madduck.net” from the browser followed by “You need to log in first” followed by “login failed, perhaps you need to turn on cookies?” (which should have been mentioned on the login screen) and then I got bored, so I’m calling that not fully working.
I feel left out. No link for my buggy captcha?
Seriously, more info would be appreciated. This would be the first I’ve heard of it.
Heh. Well, it’s a less severe case of the Blogger.com problems, so just borrow the first link, OK?
Seriously, I’ve not seen it yet on WordPress blogs that I’ve installed and the message isn’t in the source code that I’ve grepped, so I think it’s probably some common plugin like Akismet (commercial use not allowed IIRC, so non-free). You must know what it is – your comment policy says “my site may present commenters with a set of letters and numbers in a funny-looking image” [and sod people with poor eyesight...]
Oh, I see; my CAPTCHA is a more-or-less correct implementation of a bad idea. I thought maybe I had an incorrect implementation of a bad idea.
Yes, I knew about it before. My CAPTCHA is part of the Spam Karma plugin for WordPress; it only fires for “borderline” comments. After reading about the CAPTCHA industry in India, and considering how few spams are really borderline enough to trigger it, I disabled it.
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Right. My comments on Spam Karma are on http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/blogmoves#commentimg “If that’s the Spam Karma 2 mentioned in the footer, I suspect someone will be reincarnated as flame-roasted tinned meat soon.” It’s been around ages, it’s a broken design and removing/avoiding it has been a nice little earner for me over the last year.
Can you see why it fired for my comment, which was pretty much as above? Hardly borderline spam, was it? Thanks for disabling it.
FWIW, your comment was “borderline” because you had JavaScript disabled. I may need to look into how effective that plugin is, too.
Spam Karma is now orphaned, which has put me in the market for a better comment spam filter for WordPress. Any recommendations?
I’m using TypePad AntiSpam (akismet-like without discrimination against commercial use) along with a home-made multi-blog comment moderator for WordPress-MU that I will release Real Soon Now.